The sheets and nightgowns semaphore a breeze,
next door to Kali’s multicolored dome,
the sun-bleached, tattered signals from the dying.

Below, in the street, a mother suckles as
a barber shaves her head. We watch from where
the sheets and nightgowns semaphore a breeze.

Hair scatters under rickshaw wheels. Skull, breast,
child’s head, are brown balloons from here among
the sun-bleached, tattered signals from the dying.

Religion’s sacrifice or lice? A sacred
cow breaks her fast on a shrine’s marigolds,
while sheets and nightgowns semaphore a breeze.

A man, in the street’s throbbing hive of color,
grills silver fish, sends up delicious incense
to sun-bleached, tattered signals from the dying.

Next door the gutters run with goat’s blood, as Kali
imbibes her feast. Above those twitching legs,
the sun-bleached tattered signals from the dying
of sheets and nightgowns semaphore a breeze.

—

KAREN SWENSON’s poems have been published in The
New Yorker, The
Saturday
Review, The Georgia Review and other publications. Her travel
articles have
appeared in The New York Times and The
Wall Street Journal. She is presently
teaching at Barnard College. Her fifth book will be coming out in the
spring of
2008 from Tiger Bark Press.